We sailed back into New York City at some crazy early hour and, as the decks had all been closed, we decided not to get up to watch our arrival in the dark. To give you an idea of how cold; by the time we were up, showered, dressed and ready to go for brekkie, it had only made it to -11.4 degrees Celsius! The museum ship moored alongside us was still covered in snow.

My cousin Steven had offered to come and fetch us so we could spend the day with all the family before flying out. We did not think, from the news we were watching, that anyone would want to venture outdoors let alone come to the cruise terminal but, after exchanging a few text messages, there they were!

We had a fun time with Steven, Stacey, Brett and Matthew at the Science museum where we played with and on all sorts of experiments, I even got to go drag racing, not something anyone usually lets me do :-) There was still lots of snow to be seen everywhere so I felt I ought to throw some at the boys :-)

Later we met Seymour and Esther at the appropriately named for this trip Flagship Diner where Annie and I had all American delicacies of pancakes. Steven and family had to head off to Lego building camp and, as we still had some time to spare, went back to Esther and Seymour's flat for a while before they dropped us at JFK.

We were fortunate enough to depart just two hours late, an hour of which was made up along the way thanks to the strong tailwinds. We saw news of many cancelled flights and people sleeping at the airport.